Ehrenberg: Arizona's Forgotten River Port

Ehrenberg sits on the Arizona bank of the Colorado River directly across from Blythe, California, at one of the river's historic crossing points. The town was established in eighteen sixty-three during the Arizona mining rush and named for Herman Ehrenberg, a German-born surveyor and mining promoter who was murdered at Dos Palmas, California, in eighteen sixty-six, three years before the town took his name.

In the eighteen seventies and eighties, Ehrenberg was a significant supply port on the Colorado River steamboat route, receiving goods from the Gulf of California and redistributing them to the interior mining camps. When the railroad arrived further north and the mines played out, the town lost its reason to exist. Today Ehrenberg is a small community of under a thousand people, best known to long-haul truckers as a fuel stop on Interstate Ten and to winter residents who park their RVs along the river each season.